Rappers are obsessed with power. The 48 Laws of Power, an infamous manual by Robert Greene, has long been required reading for hip-hoppers of a certain stature, from 50 Cent on down. One day Jay-Z might get around to reading Foucault and Bourdieu. For now, hip-hop remains concerned with imperial might, with royalty and Rome. Watch the Throne, Jay-Z and Kanye West's blockbuster collaboration, makes overt reference to kingcraft, nodding to the exalted status of its makers and invoking the "p-p-p paranoia" that comes with power. One track – the frankly rocking "Why I Love You" – finds the overgrown apprentice and his former master twitching sleeplessly, trading lines, wondering which of their trusted consiglieri will deliver the coup de grace. Do West and Carter fear assassination? Possibly. The Mark Chapmans of hip-hop may well be familiar with firearms.

But "Why I Love You" is pure pop aggrandisement. It equates these two recording artists with Caesars, and makes the tendentious point that being Sean Carter or Kanye West can have its downsides (or, as the Notorious BIG had it: "Mo Money, Mo Problems". This rather enjoyable piece of maximalism feels quite at home on an album writ so large, both in sound and verse, that a planetarium was deemed the only fitting venue for its first playback.

It's better than West's last, impressive album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. With fantastically varied production, Watch the Throne marches hungrily forward, belying its genesis in a series of swanky hotel rooms. There is glacial minimalism from the Neptunes, some scattershot dubstep, and West himself, speeding soul hits up like back in the day, Auto-Tuning Nina Simone on "New Day", no less.

Specifically, Watch the Throne is about black power, although the Black Panthers might not recognise it as such. Power here is conceived as a swaggering taunt of achievement, in line with both men's previous works, which routinely double as shopping guides. Jay-Z spends so much time discussing high-end watches ("New watch alert/ Hublot's"), "Watch" the Throne might as well literally be a timepiece catalogue. Some find this sort of branded gloating distasteful, but at their best both rappers can still make you laugh. On "Otis", for instance, West declares himself "Luxury rap/ The Hermès of verses". (That's the label, incidentally, not the god.)

But tracks such as "Murder to Excellence" and "Made in America" make plain the reasons Carter and West are bullish about their achievements. The former is scathing about the black "holocaust", about black-on-black violence. What are the chances of a fatherless drug dealer such as Carter becoming king of the world? This retelling of his autobiography is compelling, in contrast to his recent solo form. Embedded in all the bragging, the leering, the amorality and the preposterous way Jay-Z refers to his missus ("That's My Bitch"), there are enduring passages of contextual autobiography. Addressed to their unborn children, "New Day" exhibits some much-needed self-knowledge. Carter and West know that they need to humanise all the conspicuous consumption. Having studied power they know that their most likely nemesis is not some gun-wielding fan, but hubris.